NEW YORK & LOS ANGELES — Mediaocean, the leading software provider for the advertising world, with 80,000 users across all major holding companies, announced today that it has partnered with Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI), which operates one of the largest open advertising marketplaces in the world, to offer a global automated guaranteed solution for its direct advertising business.

The partnership aims to help scale automation efforts for the direct buying sector — the largest component of the digital advertising market — through the integration of Rubicon Project’s industry-leading Orders product with Mediaocean’s Prisma platform. Rubicon Project’s Orders technology is specifically engineered to connect buyers to premium publishers at scale, and has automated the discovery, negotiation and buying of the most coveted digital inventory in the world.

According to IDC, the direct advertising market — in which display advertising buys are largely executed manually and have yet to be impacted by the growth of programmatic technology — is forecast to surpass $60 billion in 2016. Prisma, Mediaocean’s addressable media management platform, directs the workflow for the majority of this fast growing market by managing every step of the campaign lifecycle – from planning and buying, to reporting and reconciliation.

Integrating Mediaocean buy and sell-side with Rubicon Project buy and sell-side technologies, the combined Orders Solution will offer unprecedented scale, efficiencies and a standardized end-to-end process for billions of dollars of direct sold campaigns from the world’s largest brand advertisers.

“Every major media buying agency in the world utilizes Mediaocean to plan and execute tens of billions of dollars in digital advertising,” said Mediaocean Chief Product Officer, Manu Warikoo. “I have seen each side make deep technology investments to bring efficiency to the guaranteed digital media segment. While there is exceptional progress being made, the information exchange between buyers and sellers is still afflicted with manual steps and friction. The partnership with Rubicon Project will provide the largest industry-wide solution for automating direct buys, by uniting the world’s largest agency base with the most premium inventory provider. Additionally, we are bringing the power of programmatic technology to the largest segment of digital marketing among global brands and agencies: direct buying.

“The significance of our partnership with Mediaocean to enable automation to reach into the rapidly growing direct advertising sector cannot be overstated,” said Ryan Polley, SVP Product Management & Strategy, Rubicon Project. “Our partnership and the direct benefits it will make available to both buyers and sellers globally signals a clear evolutionary shift in how media has traditionally been bought and sold, creating a new direct buying standard for the entire industry. We look forward to building this exciting new future for both publishers and advertisers together with Mediaocean.”